Tetris Meets Go on the PSN

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Hands-on with Blokus, Gameloft's iPhone puzzle game remade for PS3.

By Michael Thomsen

With Lumines, Meteos, Tetris Attacks, and Planet Puzzle League, you might think the variations on block-based puzzle games have been exhausted. Consider Blokus as proof that you're wrong. Blokus began life as a 4-player board game and Gameloft made it a hit with iPhone and iPad versions. Now the company is bringing the game to the PSN with local and online multiplayer and it's something that could become a great new addiction for puzzle game fans.

Blokus is a simple concept. You and three other players start a round with 20 puzzle pieces each, Tetris-like arrangements of blocks that can be one to five blocks big. The board is a square grid and the goal is to get all of your 20 pieces placed on the board before any other player. Each player must start by placing a piece in the corner closest to them, and each consecutive piece must be placed directly adjacent to another of your own pieces, but can never actually touch. Basically one corner of every piece you place must always touch the corner of one of your other pieces, but the sides themselves can never touch.

It won't take more than a few rounds before you'll notice your patterns are coming in direct conflict with other players as they build out from their own corners. With some good strategy you can use your pieces to cut off your opponents and limit the places they can put subsequent pieces down. In most games you'll run out of options to put down new pieces with as many as 5 or 6 pieces still in your hand. When there's no place a piece can be put on the board it will show in your hand as grayed out. If the game ends and no one has emptied their hand -- a very common scenario -- the winner will be determined by points. You get points for the total number of pieces you've played on the board, so it behooves players to get rid of their biggest blocks as early as possible to keep their options open down the road.

Like the iPhone game, Blokus is split into a couple of simple modes. You can play a tournament or compete in individual rounds with three other players, both playable online or locally. There's also a special mode for color blind people, which is a thoughtful inclusion for a game built around colored blocks.

The game can be controlled with a DualShock or a Move controller. With the DualShock you'll use the left stick to move pieces around the board and flip or rotate them with shoulder buttons. With the Move controller you move the pieces by picking them up with the central Move button and then dragging them around the board. When the piece is in place, you'll hit the Move button again to lock it in. You can also rotate pieces with a circular overlay that can be twisted and rotated by dragging it with the Move cursor. It's slightly more cumbersome than using the shoulder buttons on the PS3 controller, but it works well enough once you've got the hang of it.

Like most puzzle games, Blokus has a simple concept but the number of meaningfully different strategies are really varied. You can play aggressively by trying to block other players, or just ignore them and stay in your own turf trying to avoid an encounter for as long as possible. It's an easy game to get into and a hard game to get out of.

Blokus isn't the flashiest game and it's more or less similar to the version you can play on iPhone and iPad with only a few tweaks for the PSN, but it should be a pleasant surprise for those unfamiliar with the boardgame or just looking for a new way to tease their brains.